Official

Outline: New Transfer System & Offices HQ

After the recent updates it's important to keep everyone in the loop on what we're planning to do next when it comes to gameplay. Today I'll start with transfers, which will be our first major gameplay update. I've attempted to design something that addresses as many of your requests as possible in the process.

THE PROBLEM - Issues with the current system:

• A lack of high quality drivers and staff, particularly Chief Designers


• Auctions last for hours, making it hard to follow and to check on their progress


• There is often nothing new on the transfers list for hours at a time, due to the slow auctions


• If you lose an auction, the tokens are not returned, which can be quite a negative experience


• If you sell drivers or staff on auction, they often fail to appear in the transfers list, because the list is small and already populated with other drivers and staff that are being auctioned - this results in a high rate of failures to sell


• The Offices & Hospitality HQ does not really serve a valuable purpose and is often overlooked when developing a team

THE SOLUTION - The New Transfer System & Offices HQ

• When you sell drivers or staff, instead of an auction period which lasts several hours, this will be a "for sale" period.


• Every 4 minutes the Transfers list will create new auctions using "for sale" drivers and staff, rotating them every time. There will only be one countdown timer for the entire list. All auctions on the list will start and end at the same time, lasting 4 minutes.


• "For sale" drivers and staff that are not on the transfers list will be available to purchase with the "buy now" button, which will replace the auction on their profile. If they are pulled in to the transfers list then the "buy now" option will become unavailable (the final nail in the coffin for scripts to exploit the transfers system. I'll explain later in the post)


• We will return Tokens to managers that don't win auctions


• The Offices & Hospitality HQ will produce talented young staff, in the same way the Young Driver Academy does for drivers.

What are the benefits of the new approach?

• You only spend Tokens if you win an auction


• The transfers system comes to life, with something new to see throughout the day


• You never have to wait more than a few minutes to conclude an auction


• All drivers and staff that are being sold will have an opportunity to appear on the transfers list due to the constant rotation.


• Alternating "bid" and "buy now" purchasing as they go in and out of transfers eliminates any possible script exploits. When "buy now" is available on the transfers list (as in the existing system) a script could scan the list each time it refreshes, instantly snatching any good drivers/staff, before anyone else even has a chance to see them. Frankly, this could even be happening now. It might be a contributor to the lack of quality in the market. In the new system any script would have to win a normal auction by bidding, and it would quickly run out of Tokens, making it completely ineffective. By returning Tokens to players we also ensure that even if there is a very determined bot/script bidding, they won't lose any Tokens in the process.


• The Offices & Hospitality HQ goes from being almost obsolete to as valuable as any other HQ.


• There will be a new way to scout and promote young staff as with young drivers.

Also, thanks to those of you who recommended I take a look at Top Eleven in the other threads. Anyone familiar with it will have seen the inspiration their auction system provided. It gave me some valuable insights which I then built on and incorporated in to the context of iGP.

As for how long this update will take, realistically, it's going to be a few weeks. I tried to design it in such a way that it wouldn't be a complete rewrite but could be built on top of much of the existing system, so that we can get it built faster and move on to other gameplay which also needs our attention.

I second everything Timothy and Noob said above. You always have the option to stop bidding at whatever your budget is, and your Tokens will be returned, which is a key change in the new system. The new HQ will also allow you to recruit staff outside of Transfers, and you can still transfer between teams using "buy now", outside of the transfer system, which costs 9 Tokens.

There are also other factors at play in Top Eleven that their make their auctions as they are. Taking inspiration from their system does not mean it will be the same experience. I'm actually more concerned that you won't ever find anyone to bid against, with so many auctions going on. For example, Top Eleven reached over 100 million users in 2015. However many people you are bidding against in Top Eleven, you can divide it by 100, maybe even 1000, to get the number you will be competing with in iGP. Not only that, we have a bigger list of auctions than they do, and it's split by player levels. I suspect this is not true in Top Eleven, and they probably share the same list across multiple/all levels, scaling the attributes of the auctioned players to the winning manager. So whatever you're seeing there, it has very few parallels other than the 4 minute timer with what it will be like here. You'll be competing with probably up to 1000 times less people (especially after factoring in that the list you see is only being seen by other people around your level), bidding on a longer list of auctions.